German water and recycling group Remondis has purchased a soft plastics pelletising unit capable of turning used plastics into pellets for feedstock in new plastic products in Perth when it becomes operational in 2024.
The new unit is being sourced from CEMAC in Austria and will be located at the company’s Jandakot materials recovery centre where it will produce up to 5000 tonnes of low-density polyethylene pellets per year. The machine can accept a wide variety of different plastics, including film and rigid plastics. It removes volatile compounds through a triple degassing process.
“This equipment is the epitome of circular economy recycling. What goes in the unit comes out in purest-form pellets that can be used to make new similar products, which is a notch above lesser recycling equipment where pellets are down-cycled and be used to make lower grade products,” Redmondis Australia general manager for WA Chris Gusenzow said.
“This is as close as we can get to a silver bullet recycling solution.”
After banning the export of certain types of plastic and the failure of the supermarket-led REDcycle soft plastics recycling scheme, Australia has been searching for solutions to its mounting soft plastic waste stockpile.
The REDcycle collapse left behind a stockpile of around 11,000 of unrecycled soft plastics. Coles, Woolworths and Aldi have since stepped into the breech, offering to assume control of the stockpiles and find circular solutions. They have established the Soft Plastics Recycling Contribution Fund with multimillion-dollar seed investments that will investigate recycling solutions for the stockpile, which may initially involve offshore processing.
The new Redmondis recycling kit will help address some of the Western Australian stockpiles, although the company didn’t provide detail on where it would source the soft plastics from.
“This recycling equipment really is a win for industry in terms of controlling disposal costs, and a win for the environment in terms of more being done with existing products, thereby reducing the need for new plastics being manufactured and disposed of,” CEMAC technologies managing director Eric Paulsen said.